The age old debate: Mac or PC?

Unless you actually need a Mac, go with a PC.

I work on both. I've been working in Mac's since 1984. Mac is nice. Easy to use, sexy. It also has about 1/1000th the software as a PC.

Now you can dual boot into windows and it works fine as a PC too. With Parallels you won't even see the windows boot screen. Great way to get 2-for-1.

For the cost of a Mac, you can buy an animal of a PC laptop AND a Mac Mini.

I've got an old Mac G3 that I use to test software and site designs. If I replace it, I'll toss a Mac Mini in it's place for $600 or $800.

If you were working in a Mac-only environment, I would go Mac. Artists like Mac not because it helps them release the inner elitist-douche as most people believe, they like them because Mac's handle fonts differently than PCs. PC never really built the font handling to the level graphic artists need. I'd have to look to see if there is still a difference in screen resolution on the Macs. Macs used to be 96 dpi and PC 72 dpi.

So if you are going into graphic design, you pretty much have to go Mac. If you are a noob with computers I tell people to go Mac. Yes, those people still exist. You're already PC compatible so you need to figure out what you want out of a Mac.

 

The font thing isn't even really true anymore. Since Windows 2000, PCs can handle Postscript Type1 fonts natively just fine (they always could if you bought Adobe Type Manager). The Microsoft TrueType format is actually a very good outline vector-based font format on its own, technically superior to Postscript.

Printing in Mac OS X actually really sucks. It's a BSD Unix userland underneath, and they built their printing support on top of the Common Unix Printing System, which is a fairly immature open source project. Printer handling in Unix systems is generally pretty bad. Sadly, these days, Windows is the best game in town when it comes to printing, even though it isn't really all that great. Maybe a better way to put it is that it's the worst one, except for all the others.

The low-level OS X kernel really sucks, too. It's based on the Mach kernel, which is an academically interesting OS, but doesn't work all that well under real use. To be fair, though, the Windows kernel suffers from the same problems, so this shouldn't impact your choice either way.

Despite the above, I would still recommend a Mac for certain things. Design work is actually not one of them (not that the Mac is a poor choice here; it just doesn't matter either way). However, there are two areas where the Mac is an excellent choice: Programming and software compatibility. Now, if you want something good for programming but don't care about software compatibility, use Linux, it's really good for that, and you can't beat the price. You won't get much compatibility with Linux, though -- so much so that it can be a serious problem. However, you can't beat a Mac for software compatibility. Get Parallels, and you can run Mac software, Windows software, and, with the BSD subsystem underneath, you can run commercial and open-source Unix software. If you don't care about either of those things, though, you may not gain much from a Mac.

A common complaint I hear about Macs (aside from the irritating userbase, and who cares who else uses it; use whatever works for you) is that they are expensive. They are, but that's not because they are overpriced. If you look at the hardware in a Mac, and go to Dell with the same specs, the Dell will cost you more. Apple just doesn't have the variety of low-end systems that PC vendors have. Honestly, their systems are built pretty well, too. If you wanted a fairly high-end system anyway, they're pretty nice.

 

Sorry Symen, I have to disagree with you on the font issue.

True Type is just find and dandy. It does a reasonable job at screen and output. It doesn't handle kerning pairs, descenders, line spacing and super/subscripts the same way as Postscript. It just doesn't. True Type is more of a typeface technology, not a font technology. Ligatures alone are handled horribly on PC. Most True Type fonts are actually just typefaces.

Which leads to enormous issues in professional printing.

90% of all the professional level equipment is pure Postscript. RIPs, direct to film, cut plotters, positive film output, cutting machines, separators, digital printing presses, direct to plate and even computer controlled etchers all plot out to Postscript via pure or EPS.

True Type to Postscript conversion is common place, PC's even have PostScript output built in after XP. The issues pop up when you pull up that PC output and notice that your copy doesn't flow around the pictures the way it should, or runs off the bottom of the page. Just kerning pairs alone can cause line length changes. True ligatures push it over the edge.

I deal with about 30 different graphic artists. All of them say the exact same thing, "If it wasn't for the font problems I'd probably go PC."

If you print a dozen documents from PC and Mac, every one of those artists can tell which is PC and which is Mac from the fonts alone. The PC is better at it than it used to be, but the platform hasn't historically cared about professional printing.

I had to call one of my artists to ask about PC Postscript. The PC is pretty good he said, but it's pretty common to still have to touch the files before they make film. He said that about 6 years ago it looked like the PC was going to go after that sector but there hasn't been a lot of movement.

 

I am sending this thread to the news agency's! Think this is the first of it's kind with no flaming!!!!

I would go mac if I could afford it, like they said it can dual boot both OS's and for the most part people who own them love them.

 

I'm sticking with the fat guy...I feel sorry for him.

 

I have a Dell Latitude e6400 and a Macbook Pro. I use the Macbook for all of my personal stuff and the Dell for work. If I never owned the Macbook then I would love the e6400. That being said - I am a now a Mac fanboy....

 

I LOVE Mac. And I LOVE my PC.

I may have to get a new laptop as well. I want an Alienware M17x.

I'd go Mac, but all my software is PC. I don't really want to buy it all again.

 

No need to apologize, it's perfectly reasonable for people to have differing opinions on complex issues. Actually, it would be strange if everyone was always in perfect agreement.

TrueType and Postscript use different mathematical formulas internally to describe their curves. Because of this, conversions between the two are typically imperfect. There are other differences, too, which mostly come down to Postscript using a smart interpreter with comparitively little flexibility for a font to describe itself, where TrueType uses a dumb interpreter with more flexibility for the font to describe itself. I have no opinion on which approach is better, though I do think that it is a very cool feature that fonts improve when the Postscript engine is upgraded.

I do tend to agree with you that Postscript fonts are better when it comes to printing. Any printer made after about 1998 or so is Postscript level 3 and includes a hardware rasterizer for TrueType fonts. It's not perfect though, as you point out, so it's really better just to use Postscript.

This was the point of my original post; that since Windows 2000, Windows PCs have built-in support for Postscript, which works quite well. Even before that, ATM was available for Windows; I remember using it as early as 1993 or so. Yes, Windows does ship with a small collection of TrueType and OpenType fonts, and even a few ancient raster fonts for backward compatibility, but no Type1 fonts at all. So does OS X. When you're doing serious work on either OS, you don't use those fonts anyway, you buy a pack of really nice ones and use those.

The graphic artists I work with agree with yours. I'll leave it at that.